Archive for year 2011

A while back I said that metrics and measurements have a tendency to limit our potential. What I failed to realize was that this is only the case when we measure the wrong things. As bloggers it’s really easy to get caught up in comparison and competition. As a result we end up measuring the things that don’t have a strong impact on our business.

3 Metrics That Don’t Really Matter Much

1. Traffic

A few weeks back I had a post that went viral on Stumbleupon. It sent over 160,000 visits to my blog in a week. If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that all traffic is not equal and traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to revenue. Do you need traffic? Absolutely. But if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that quality trumps quantity . You don’t need 100,000 visitors, just a tribe who actually cares.

2. Tweets, Likes, Fans and Followers

Marcus Sheridan wrote an interesting post the other day, which I thought was really reflective of this. The posts that have made him the most money from his pool business are not necessarily the most popular. Just because a post is popular on social media it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s valuable for your customers or your business.

3. Comments

Talk to Dan Andrews and you’ll realize that the people who comment on your blog are not an accurate representation of your readers. The people who comment on your blog are usually other bloggers, and there is a “silent majority” who read everything you write, but don’t comment. While it’s nice to have comments on your posts, it’s not as important as you might think.

Metrics that Matter

1. Email Subscribers

There’s not one person who is successful that won’t tell you that your email list is what generates your money. A few months back I made a very conscious decision to focus on this group of readers, and interestingly enough I have a much deeper connection with my readers. My traffic is higher than ever before, and my blog is growing faster than ever before. This is your “silent majority” and this is who you need to cater to.

2. Conversion Rates

Many people get caught up in writing guests posts at the most popular blogs. Other than bragging rights a post on a really popular blog might not do much for you. On the flip side a popular personal development blog that I write for sends me anywhere between 50-60 new subscribers per guest post. The key is of course to write great content and use a well written custom landing page.

3. Open Rates

It’s nice to have a list, but if nobody is opening your emails than it doesn’t matter. A list of 50 people who talk to you is better than a list of 5000 who ignore you. I recently decided to clean house on my email list and deleted almost 350 people from the list because they hadn’t opened any of my emails in the last 4 months. Don’t be afraid to let some of your subscribers go.

4. Revenue

If you’re in this to make money, then this is the only metric that ultimately matters. When I recently spoke to a business coach she told me something really interesting. There are people who make plenty of money online that you’ve never heard of. Do you actually measure the revenue you generate? Even if it’s $100 make a point to measure it.

Measuring all the wrong metrics can make it really difficult to turn social media attention into income. Unfortunately many early stage bloggers get caught up in the trap of all these metrics. What’s been your experience with this?

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I’ve had a variety of sales jobs in my career and have dealt with some great people … and some world-class jerks. Not just difficult and demanding people, but unethical, bullying, liars at Fortune 100 companies.

One time, a powerful VP demanded that my company buy-back $1.2 million of our material due to a cosmetic issue that did not affect the performance of their end product. In fact, the defect would not even be visible to their consumer. It was a dicey situation. Yes, we were “out of specification,” but this was also going to be a painful financial hit for my company. It was like being ticketed for going 56 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone.

In the end, we paid an $850,000 claim for the products that were made from the defective material.

I later found out this VP secretly sold the defective products to his customer any way, simply adding our claim payment to his bottom line (and annual bonus payment) through some accounting jujitsu. My customer loved bragging about his cleverness to demonstrate the power he could wield over my company.

The dude was eventually fired for this type of behavior, but that did little to comfort me when I still had to work with him every day. And yet, I really had no choice but to take it or quit. This guy was personally responsible for the acquisition of $1.5 billion of my company’s products — at that time, 10 percent of my employer’s total revenue! I had a one-line job description: Don’t lose the account.

I knew that I would only be in the sales position for a few years at the most, so I decided to weather the storm and approach the challenge patiently and calmly, as long as my own ethics or any laws were not compromised.

I realized that the customer is NOT always right. But the customer is always the customer. I was the one who had to adapt to survive and compete.

Fortunately, this is an extreme example but the point is, we can’t always demand that a customer — even a really bad one – change to conform to our needs and processes. Only we can change to adopt to the customer’s needs … or, if it gets too bad, quit.

Understanding this wisdom is difficult but a key to success in a fiercely competitive world.

This story came to mind because last week we had a debate on {grow} about the customer demands for rapid online service, even from hotels, restaurants, and other providers who are on the “value” end of the product line. This is an unfortunate development but they really only have one choice: Figure out how to adapt to the customer service needs AND maintain a low cost structure. They’re not going to be able to dictate customer expectations and still compete in the long term.

I’m currently working with a supplier that is imposing new processes that will take up more of my time and dramatically hurt my cash flow. As a business partner, I want to cooperate and make the whole “system” better, but when I point out that their service levels are declining and the value of these new processes seems to be flowing in only in their direction, their response is defensive instead of responsive. And you know … they might be right and I might be wrong. I’m not perfect. But I’m still the customer.

They may get away with it for awhile if the switching costs are high, but in general the information flow of the web has dis-intermediated many traditional competitive hurdles. It’s easier than ever to find new suppliers for most goods.

In the end, all of us who have to compete for a living know we have just one true source of competitive advantage –

As buzzwords go, “crowdsourcing” may not be as big as “social-media” or “mobile apps” but new research show it is one of the most rapidly-expanding trends in our field.

Crowdsourcing represents an epic shift in the world of labor, automation, and information science, one with large economic and ethical implications. Everybody is looking at this trend and wondering, “How big is the market?” “How fast is it changing?” and “Which companies should I be working with?” So the Daily Crowdsource is beginning to explore some of those questions through original research.

To answer these questions accurately, we took the last three months to perform a thorough analysis of enterprise-grade microtasking vendors and produced a market report. We chose the ‘microtasking’ sector to start with because it’s one of the two sectors that enterprises can benefit from the most. Here’s what we found:

If you’re wondering why Amazon’s MTurk isn’t on the list, it’s because they operate quite differently than the evaluated providers. MTurk, though one of the largest and most well-known suppliers of microtasks, lacks the quality & validation checks that enterprise clients require. Although enterprises can develop their own quality-assurance system in Mturk, the value of sophisticated, field-tested algorithms far outweigh the cost increases associated with using one of these other six quality-focused platforms.

The market demand for crowd-sourced work quintupled in 2010 & almost quadrupled in 2011:

Despite being around for six years, the microtasking field was in the testing phase for the first three years. Several platforms were revamped, relaunched, or finally “released” in 2009. Client adoption was also slow until 2009 when the first surge in market demand occurred. Last year, the number of completed microtasks increased 496% over 2009. The number of tasks completed in 2011 is estimated to increase 355%

Despite this quick growth, the field is still in its infancy. How quickly it will mature is yet to be seen. Is this growth sustainable? One clue to this answer is that microtasking has yet to be adopted by many large companies. This rate of adoption is also increasing so 2012 could be another years of explosive growth for this nascent industry.

With the growing importance (and controversy) of microtasking, it’s critical that we start measuring and understanding these trends. This is the first of what I hope will be a series of research efforts to understand this business model.

Have you experimented with crowdsourcing yet? How could you use it?

David Bratvold is the founder of Daily Crowdsource, the #1 site for crowdsourcing news, training & resources. His goal is to educate business professionals on the benefits of crowdsourcing. He will present more of his findings at Social Slam 2012.

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